Complaint department

Complaint department January 22, 2025

First, the big news here: January 30 — one week from tomorrow. That’s our new surgery day.

I don’t know if the four days of phone calls from my daughters and I made any difference, but the newfound urgency from Penn Medicine  is a huge change. The procedure my wife has needed for more than three years now is categorized by The Health Care System, Inc. as “elective” surgery, so every time it’s been canceled she’s been sent back to the back of the line, with everything intolerably pushed back three or four or six more months.

The as-soon-as-possible rescheduling here shows that they’re finally understanding that every day of delay puts her health — and life — at greater risk, and forces her to endure severe  pain that is not necessary.

I like to think my many phone calls helped them understand this, but who knows? The Health Care System, Inc. is opaque and inscrutable, far beyond the powerless reach of patients and other mere mortals. Maybe those phone calls made all the difference. Maybe they meant nothing at all. Either way, it was what we could do, so we did it.

That’s sometimes how it works. When something is the only thing left that you can do, you do it — not because you know it will “work,” or because you’re sure it will change everything, or anything, but because it is the only thing left that you can do.

A lot of — waves hands generally at everything — our context right now is similar to this. We seem powerless. We are literally out of power, with every branch of the government and the oligarchy in the hands of MAGA majorities. They are in control of the White House, and of the House, and the Senate, and the Supreme Court. And whatever is not in their political control seems to be in their financial control, in the hands of the billionaires whose incomprehensible money power puts them beyond the reach of both the law and market forces.

We are not in control. They are. They are in control of — and therefore responsible for — everything.

So what we can do now is make them own that. Every outcome, every unfairness is their responsibility. Every problem is their responsibility. Every problem is their problem.

And, as you may have noticed, there are a lot of problems. Part of our job, for now, is pointing that out. Repeatedly and endlessly. They’re in charge. They own this. So what are they going to do about it?

This is not something they’re equipped to handle. MAGA is the party of grievance, not of solutions or of competence. And their focus has been almost entirely on imagined grievances — “they’re eating the dogs! they’re eating the cats!” etc. That only serves them when: A) they’re out of power and not seen as responsible for addressing grievances, and B) they’re able to keep the focus entirely on those imaginary grievances and not on any of the myriad legitimate grievances that everyone has because (again waves hands, generally, at everything).

So we need to keep the focus on legitimate problems. That’s the argument made here by Jonathan Last and here by Jason Linkins and here by Tom Sullivan.

Linkins writes:

Liberals need to get into the business of identifying the problems that real Americans face (which honestly, is something they could stand to relearn how to do) and more forcefully blame Trump for those problems’ continued existence. They need to raise a hue and cry over everything under the sun that’s broken, dysfunctional, or trending in the wrong direction; pile line items on Trump’s to-do list, wake him up early and keep him up late. Every day, get in front of cable news cameras and reporters’ notepads with a new problem for Trump to solve and fresh complaints about the work not done.

He’s addressing Professional Democrats there, but the same thing applies, I think, to those of us whose lives do not involve the possibility of “getting in front of cable news cameras.” Complain about real problems. All of them. Remind everyone that things don’t have to be broken, and burdensome, and enshittified, top-to-bottom, every day. Talk about this to everyone we know and everyone we meet.

Because we are not Professional Democrats, it doesn’t require any special outreach for us “to get into the business of identifying the problems that real Americans face.” We are, in fact, those real Americans and we do, in fact, face those problems ourselves, day in and day out.

Unlike my phone calls to Penn Medicine, the hope of this complaining is not that Trump will be persuaded to tackle this massive “to-do list” of actual problems. I have no expectation that he or the MAGA majorities in Congress has the desire or the capacity to face real problems in any real way. This is not the parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge because these folks will never listen to widows and orphans and aliens and the poor.

But by listing and repeating these complaints — by holding those now responsible for everything responsible for real problems and not just for their imaginary ones — we can remind the majority of our neighbors that focusing on those real problems matters more to them than fantasizing about all the distracting imaginary ones. Nobody actually struggling to pay student loans, or to afford housing, or wrestling with the inhumanity of The Health Care System, Inc., is going to be able to convince themselves that their lives would be made easier if the United States invaded Greenland.

The point of this complaining, in other words, is to persuade others to turn against the party of imaginary grievances and to focus, instead, on real problems and the real solutions that could improve their lives and the lives of their neighbors. This approach has the added benefit of creating an agenda for those Professional Democrats, should they ever regain power, and the force of a mandate to hold them accountable for addressing those real problems when it again becomes their job to do so.

Anyway, January 30. Next Thursday. We live in hope.

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